Pride and not a fall

We 80,000 solicitors are the main gateway to justice and enablers of commerce.

We are 80,000 who put their clients first and whose rewards are no more than a consequence of that; 80,000 spread across the entire spectrum of business and domestic needs through England and Wales and beyond; 80,000 without whom business and society could not cope.

We conduct and advise on no fewer than 15 million transactions a year with high client satisfaction.

We are more diverse and versatile in what we do than any other profession.

Practically all of us number community services among our professional or private activities.We are highly regarded internationally and include many of the world's leading law firms and individual practitioners.Despite the knocking which lawyers everywhere endure, our stock is in general high.

If we were allowed to float on the Stock Exchange there would be no shortage of ethical investors.Each of us should be visibly proud that we are solicitors.

Proud that together we do so much for others in so many ways as part of our everyday professional lives.This wider pride is present at admission ceremonies.

Eighty or so admittees - genders in balance and usually with wide ethnic representation - at the front with parents and supporters at the back, all oozing pride at the prospect of being admitted as a solicitor.

If it could be bottled and uncorked for a sniff on a lesser day this atmosphere would be elixir for all of us.

But I believe this pride is at least latent in most of us.

It needs to be recaptured and made visible.

This would encourage us to talk each other up and would put the shortcomings of a minority of solicitors when justifiably criticised in proper perspective, making them less embarrassing to the rest of us.And the same goes for the Law Society.

It needs to be widely respected.

A high standing reputation for the Law Society is an important ingredient for the future well-being of all solicitors.

An effective and respected Law Society is necessary to fight the corner in the public interest for all solicitors and their clients at a time when professional practice is under siege as never before.The not entirely well-considered intentions of the Office of Fair Trading, as contained in its report published in March 2001, need to be resisted in the public interest.A few examples will prove why.

The report suggests banks and other lending institutions should be allowed to employ solicitors to act for their borrowers.

What would their prospects be if they were to give objective advice discouraging those borrowers from accepting their employers' loans if better terms were available elsewhere?And what of the idea of a free-for-all, allowing solicitors and anybody else to accost the public in the street, ring their doorbells or telephones late at night in attempts to sell legal services? That may be normal for double glazing salesmen, but it is not what the public expects from solicitors and its advent must be resisted.The Law Society is also likely to be fighting causes again on behalf of the public and the solicitors who serve them to protect accessibility to, and the quality of, justice in the field of criminal law.

There are other campaigns to be pursued by the Society: against lending institutions behaving unfairly towards sole practitioners, and on behalf of the major international law firms that are being discriminated against in various parts of the world by countries and state bars happy to take advantage of so-called reciprocal re-qualification rights when their lawyers wish to practise in England and Wales but which maintain barriers when it comes to our solicitors applying to practise in their jurisdictions.With the benefit of the new governance and management now in place and a renewed and more representative Law Society Council, it is my task to focus beyond the internal workings of the Society.

Therefore, I will be concentrating on singing the praises and advancing the interests of all solicitors as we continue to prove how important we all are to all aspects of modern society.I invite all solicitors to lift their eyes from their own preoccupations in order to give backing to each other and to the Law Society's external programme, which is inclusive of all solicitors.A by-product of getting shoulder-to-shoulder in these respects will be a feel-better factor which, returning to my plea for more visible pride about our profession will be self-fuelling in reputation and representational terms.Let's stop being apologetic about each other and the Law Society and get on with the business of the law.David McIntosh is the Law Society President